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Survivorship
The stories and experiences are written by people after cancer treatments. These stories are written for those learning how to get back to work, college or just trying to be themselves again. Just getting past treatments isn’t enough, it is surviving and thriving that is key to being you again.
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Cancer Haunts Me Still
The ghost of cancer haunts me—its presence lingering in the shadows of my memories, a specter that refuses to fade away. It was a day etched in sorrow and disbelief, a day when the fabric of my world unraveled before my eyes.
Read More...I Am No Longer Safe
Cancer stripped away my armor, leaving me feeling exposed and vulnerable like the day I was born. The security I once took for granted vanished with my diagnoses not once, twice, but three times of acute lymphoblastic leukemia. My expectation of living a long and healthy life was shattered.
Read More...Silenced by the Language of Cancer
As a cancer patient, you learn a whole new language. Well, it’s regional: I learned the breast cancer dialect; you may be fluent in lymphoma. But we all learn it—no choice, total immersion, keep up or die. 75 visits to the hospital in one year is one heck of a Duolingo streak.
Read More...How Can This Be My Life?
Cancer is a thief in the night. Something you never think is really gonna happen to you till it does and it sends you whirling downward like Alice falling down the rabbit hole. And you just keep falling and falling.
Read More...Just One Puzzle
Imagine this—you are visiting your parents for a weekend trip that your kids have been counting down to for weeks. You are sitting with your family, puzzle on the table and snacks abounding. Your family’s love for puzzles has passed down generations and across marriages, and there are two rules: nothing under 1,000 pieces and you always start with the border.
Read More...From Passion to Purpose: Redefining Success After Cancer
“What would you say is your dream job?”
When I was asked this question in a 2018 job interview, it caught me completely off guard.
Read More...Letting the Scales Fall From My Eyes
After experiencing multiple life-threatening complications as a child and teenager from the hereditary colon cancer syndrome—Familial Adenomatous Polyposis—and developing Post Traumatic Stress Disorder as a result, healing has become a lifelong quest for over 20 years now.
Read More...My Ghost Is My Shadow
Ghost.
Noun.
an apparition of a dead person which is believed to appear or become manifest to the living, typically as a nebulous image.
Read More...Two Cancers One Ball
On February 28th, 2022, after spending hours in a panic upon receiving some out-of-reference range tumor markers in MyChart, my urologist sat me down in his office, my dad sitting a few feet from us, and soberly confirmed that I did in fact have testicular cancer.
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